


Tomorrow, We Will Be Better

by Siria



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Challenge: sticksandsnark, F/M, Grief/Mourning, POV Female Character, Rituals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-04-14
Updated: 2008-04-14
Packaged: 2017-10-03 20:16:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Teyla had almost forgotten—no. No, if she was to be honest with herself, she hadn't forgotten.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tomorrow, We Will Be Better

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the sticksandsnark challenge. Thanks to Trin for audiencing, and dogeared for betaing. For sheafrotherdon, who wanted something with Teyla's baby, and Teyla loving Rodney for himself.

Teyla had almost forgotten—no. No, if she was to be honest with herself, she hadn't forgotten. It was that she hadn't really wanted to remember. Too many of her people had died over the past year: all of them thought lost and only half of them recovered, part of that slow and steady attrition of life that had been Athos' curse since the fall of their city so many centuries before. Now that she could at last hold her son in her arms, lie in her own soft bed behind Atlantis' walls and listen to the quiet sounds of his breathing coming from his crib nearby and know that they were both safe, she didn't want to make herself remember.

She didn't think she had the strength to call back such memories just, to work through each slow, deliberate movement of the memorial tea ceremony and keep her back straight under the weight of it all. Last year, she'd had Rodney offering to sit with her, the gentle touch of Halling's hand against brow and shoulder, all to help bear her up; this year, she would have to recite Kanaan's name, and Jinto's, and Meremenn's, along with her father's, and there were some farewells she was not yet ready to say.

She had been sleeping a great deal of late.

Jennifer said it was to be expected, that sleep would heal as surely as time would, but it meant that when Rodney rang her door chime to be let in, she did not hear it; by the time Teyla woke up, Rodney was hammering against her door as if he thought she had let herself be taken by Michael again, and the noise had woken up Tanan, who was making the fretful, grizzling sounds which Teyla had swiftly learned signalled that she was about to get a demonstration of just how healthy his lungs were.

Quickly scooping her son up in her arms, she crossed the room to let Rodney in. The door slid silently open to show Rodney standing there, one arm raised as if to knock again, and a mildly surprised look on his face. "Rodney," Teyla said, bouncing Tanan slightly in her arms in a way that always soothed him, and raising her eyebrows faintly at Rodney in admonishment, "Tanan and I were just taking a nap."

"Oh," he said, blinking rapidly. "Of course, yes, I knew that. Naps are... well, I highly recommend them. I was just— Well, that's beside the point, you're here, and I wanted..." He held up one finger at her before stooping to pick up something he had laid down on the floor in the hallway: a gesture which with Rodney could mean either that he wanted her to wait for something, or that he wanted her full attention while he expounded his latest discoveries, and the theories certain to win him the adulation of Samantha Carter and the admiration of his peers. Counting on the former, Teyla suppressed a smile and walked back into her room.

She checked Tanan to make sure that he did not need to be changed or fed, with what she was faintly aware must be the over-scrupulous, nervous care of a first-time mother. Greeted only with dry skin and a burp of milk-scented breath, she laid him down in the middle of her bed and stroked his belly lightly to help him settle, marvelling all over again that she and Kanaan could have made someone so small, so infinitely full of a galaxy's bright potential.

When Teyla turned back around, it was to see that Rodney had followed her inside, and that in his hands he now held the same tray as he had last year, spread with the same red cloth and bearing the dark blue pottery that Halling had bought as a name-day present for her in the crowded, glass-roofed markets of Kirat. He had remembered, though this year he'd had no adrenaline rush of desperation to motivate him, and the level of care that spoke to from Rodney—Rodney, who had forgotten his own birthday two months ago, who loudly proclaimed himself to be above the celebration of all his people's festivals, though he would eat the special meals prepared for them all the same—that made Teyla's heart ache with affection for him. It was startling and yet unexpectedly sweet, just like Rodney himself, and Teyla had to press the heel of her hand against her breastbone to stop her laughter or her tears—she wasn't sure which.

"Hello, little man," Rodney said to Tanan, with that awkward formality which always marked his interactions with children when he was trying his best to conceal the depths of his uncertain, fumbling affection for them. Tanan, belly-full and mother-close, did not hear him, and slept on, blowing tiny spit bubbles with each outward breath. "Well." Rodney looked almost disappointed that Tanan was not awake for him to hold: a gently-squirming bundle that he could cradle uncertainly in stiff arms while he bickered with John and Ronon as to how they were each planning to best raise the child, and Teyla looked on, amused.

Teyla approved of neither Rodney's proposed methods of child-rearing—with its intensive focus on maths and physics, its lack of time to _be_—nor John's—which seemed determined to fill her son's head with popular culture references to DeLoreans and quarterbacks before Tanan could so much as speak—nor Ronon's—whose programme seemed to just have an imperfectly articulated preference towards knives. She had exchanged a number of e-mails with Jeannie Miller on the topic—her men, and all the ways in which they were no older than her son—tapping at the still-unfamiliar letter forms on her laptop's keyboard with a smile on her face. There were few instances in which Teyla thought either of the three of them could be trusted with the sole care of a child; Jeannie tended to express her agreement with Teyla's observations in capital letters.

She was, however, inclined to approve of the softened line of Rodney's mouth when he looked at Tanan, at the child he had, with unsteady hands, helped her to bring into this life in the back of a downed puddlejumper, and to approve of the way Rodney set the tea tray down on her table with exaggerated care so as not to wake him.

"I, uh," Rodney continued in a hoarse whisper, flapping his hands back and forth over the tray in what seemed like a slightly deranged version of a Kashanu merchant flamboyantly displaying her wares, "I know I presumed somewhat in showing up like this, because last year was somewhat of a, uh, an exception to most rules, and at first I wasn't going to, because it's not something that's exactly traditional for me." He straightened his back and tilted his chin up a little. "But then I figured that every tradition has to start somewhere, and I am—I have been trying to be better at these things. I made a spreadsheet? Sheppard's birthday is next month," he finished, a little desperately.

"Thank you, Rodney," Teyla said gently and with all the force of sincerity she could put into her voice, reaching out to touch him on one forearm. The bandage there had long since been removed, and the deep cut that Michael had inflicted on him had healed so that it was nothing more than thin, curling kin to the scar Kolya had left nearer his elbow, but she could still feel the slightest tremor in the muscle there at her touch. "That means a great deal to me."

"Yes," Rodney said, "well, recent events have shown that..." His gaze wandered from floor to ceiling to wall and back again, and one of his thumbs flicked backwards and forwards restlessly, in that gesture Teyla knew he used only when he was very excited, or very nervous, or both. "That is to say, despite my usual manner, I do, um. Care."

"Rodney," Teyla said, and what tinged her voice was not exasperation, though it sounded a little like it, words tumbling out on a rising and falling exhalation of breath—what strange forms of family she had learned in this city! "Of course you do. You always have."

"I have?" He seemed honestly surprised, blue eyes rounded and gazing at her in a way that seemed far too child-like for someone who had seen nearly forty summers. "Well, yes, I suppose in a general—"

"And I have always known it," Teyla interrupted him, placing one hand on the nape of his neck and tugging him down so that she could rest her forehead against his, feel his body curve around hers in the gesture which spoke of all the vulnerability her people, her family, had ever trusted to share with one another. In such an embrace—head to head, breath mingling, hands empty and clasped against one another's arms—there could be no deception, no harm, just the steady slowing of measured breath. She could feel Rodney relax, almost hear that internal chant of _okay, okay, okay_, that she knew from long experience he must be so very close to vocalising.

When Rodney's body no longer held so much of that tension, that curious, stiff way of holding himself in the face of emotion he felt too clumsy to handle, Teyla took his hand and pulled him down to sit cross-legged on one of the soft, thick rugs she had strewn across the floor. None of the floors in Atlantis were cold; their dark, polished stone was heated by the same water which ran hot and bubbling through the pipes which threaded through and along the walls, but the woven layers reminded Teyla a little of the way she had once heaped rugs on top of matting so as to mark out a space as hers on the forest floor of Athos.

She sat up a little so that she could gather Tanan into her arms, then settled back down onto the rug with him, leaving her son loosely swaddled and sleeping in the crook of her arm while she arranged herself cross-legged and faced Rodney. Here too was a familiar way to hold herself: one that she had not adopted often enough since she came to Atlantis, where there was room enough that chairs were a commonplace thing; in the room's quiet, it was a little like being back in her family's tent on light-dappled Athos in the spring. For a moment, when Teyla inhaled, she could have sworn that what she smelled was not the salt tang of the sea, but the velvety, living smell of pine and green things growing.

Teyla looked at Rodney, but he had ducked his head and was clearing his throat nervously. "Teyla-_se_," he said, as formally as if she had seen as many summers as Charin had, setting the water to heat and pattering rapidly through the words which had been spoken by her people since before the Ancestors had sought the skies, "daughter of Tagan, descendant of Magan, I sit with you as you sit with me and I share—"

"Rodney," she interrupted him, placing one hand on top of his, stilling his move to take up a heaped spoon of stout tea leaves.

His eyes grew big, and she could read the flicker-flash of his thoughts in those mobile features: the first irritation at being halted in the middle of something he'd learned swiftly replaced by the fear that he'd somehow made a mistake. That he'd offended her—and what could be calculated to derail Rodney more, to make him think that both his mind and his heart had failed him? "Did I—I asked Halling, and my memory is excellent, of course, but I know that it might not be quite so textbook eidetic as it was this time last year, but—"

Teyla shook her head. "You have done nothing wrong," she said. "Truly. But my people's tradition states that the person who serves is the one who has suffered loss."

Rodney stared at her, and Teyla knew that it was only his own, peculiar version of tact which kept him from blurting out the fact that this year his sister had lived and his city survived, and his planet had avoided destruction, and he was sitting here with her: Teyla Emmagan, who had lost most of her people, and all the homes they had tried to make under a new sun; who had lost the man she had accepted into her bed with a joyful smile and open arms, and, for a time, all the hope she had ever nurtured within her.

She arched an eyebrow at him. "Elizabeth," she said gently. "Carson." Two more beloved friends to light a candle for when the new moon came. She pulled her hand back from his, placing it flat against her own chest when she said "Kanaan. Meremenn. Jinto. This year, we serve one another."

"Well," he said, the line of his mouth softened by uncertainty, "That is, I— Thank you? But I haven't learned the words for that one."

"Nor have I," Teyla admitted with a whip-flick of a smile and a certain ruefulness. A mistake of her people, perhaps, that it was considered better that even a grief shared in common should be borne singularly; it had taught her strength as a young woman, but she wasn't certain that even that experience could stop her from staggering beneath the weight of her experiences now, if she were to be left alone. "But perhaps they are words we can compose together."

Rodney looked sharply at her for a long moment, then grinned with that rare smile of his, the one he offered up for the sake of joy in others, with no smugness behind it; the one he used to celebrate a different kind of victory and, as it always did, the generous curve of his mouth transformed his face. "Okay," he said, "okay, I can do that."

By now, the water had cooled just enough for him to set the tea to brew, his hands working around hers while she began to warm the broad, blue earthenware cups. They spoke softly as they prepared the drinks—no formal words, but shared remembrances: the songs Elizabeth had taught Teyla, her unabashed fondness for a musical group called the Beach Boys; how Kanaan had danced with her on nimble, light feet one night when there had been a full moon on New Athos but no music; Carson's feeble but enthusiastic attempts at pranks to mark each year's April Fools' Festival.

When Teyla took the first sip of her tea, her hands nursing the blue, curved warmth of her cup, it tasted just as it always had back on Athos: a little bitter, and a little sweet, the taste of it lingering on her tongue when she swallowed. There was just enough kick in it to wake her up a little, and all of it settled warm in the pit of her stomach. She could hear Rodney humming a little as he drank; she knew it had surprised the others—perhaps John, who had no liking for stout tea, most of all—at the continued preference Rodney had shown for this drink, for all that it would never replace his beloved coffee in his affections. The warmth of it had flushed his cheeks a faint pink, and kneeling here on her floor, eyes closed, he looked as content as a young _peeka_ mouse.

"Tomorrow," she said out of nowhere when she swallowed, not knowing what it was that prompted her, but feeling its certainty in the straight lines of her bones, "tomorrow we will be better."

"Yes," Rodney replied straight-away, blinking and somehow sounding faintly surprised that she could even question that capacity in herself. It was not hope in his voice, but certainty. "Yes, of course."

And in that moment, the surge of affection Teyla felt for him was so truly powerful that she felt as if she could discern the pulse of it in her blood, trembling between the fine bones of her wrists and catching in her throat. Not something safe and stable, an uncomplicated trust as it had been with Kanaan, but something surprising and unsettling; something strong as family, because after all things, this was _Rodney_, but it was new. Life had cautioned Teyla not to give in often to unreasoned impulse, but she did so now: she knelt up, and kissed Rodney on the forehead, feeling the brush of soft skin and feathery hair against her lips.

Rodney reddened, and his smile grew a little more secretive and a little more pleased, darting looks at her from beneath long lashes, but he didn't say a thing. He simply rearranged himself so that he was sitting more comfortably, his legs crossed in front of him, and brewed her another cup of tea. He let her tell him the story of the time her nine-year-old self had defied Charin's warnings and earned a broken ankle because of it; clucked softly at Tanan when he stirred and whimpered, and reached out to stroke the baby's head unthinkingly, unconsciously, until he dozed back off; and when Teyla finished her next cup, she licked her lips and tasted the bitter and the sweet, and she smiled.


End file.
